ergonomics

Before the computers were invented touch typing was already the well-known skill allowing to type faster than using the pen. First attempts to build the machine for typing took place in 18th century, but the first typewriter was invented in USA in 1860s. However, these machines were not perfect – the keys had a tendency to jam. Because of this in the later development the approaches were made to drop the traditional alphabetical order of the keys and place the most frequently used keys far from each other. It aimed also at distributing the keys among all the fingers to bring more balanced usage of all the fingers. All this attempts allowed to increase the speed of typing avoiding the jams in the machine.